Learning The Hard Way
For the first half of my life, my relationship with my body was a battle of wills. I had an autoimmune disorder, and I dealt with it by trying to beat my body into submission through a rigorous physical regimen. I looked capable on the outside, but I was living inside a hard, defensive shell.
That shell didn’t just crack; it was carved open. In 1999, emergency heart surgery and two major abdominal surgeries forced a stop that I never would have chosen for myself. When you are too weak to even stand in a shower, the physical “regimen” is gone. You are left with nothing but your internal state.
In that stillness, the work changed. It stopped being about what my body could do and started being about where my mind could go. A friend taught me how to breathe, and in that simple act, I found a doorway inward.
I realised then that the body is just the portal. Resilience is the inner architecture you build when the external world falls away. For the last twenty-five years, I’ve been teaching people how to walk through that same door, using the body as a starting point to reach the parts of ourselves that are actually unbreakable.
Oprah's Top Three
Years ago I was invited to hear Oprah Winfrey speak to a room full of female entrepreneurs. She talked for nearly an hour, and at the end she left us with three things she said were the most important she could share: cultivate the ability to hear your inner wisdom, use it to know what’s right for you, not your boss or your mum or your advisors, and only rely on those two things.
I had learned this lesson before I heard Oprah talk about it, but it wasn’t until well into my adult life that I started making decisions because I knew deep down they were right for me.
Leaving my first marriage. Remarrying. Moving to Australia with maxed-out credit cards, and a dream. Just as Oprah shared in her talk, at every crossroads, the people who loved me thought I was making a mistake.
Every time, something inside me knew otherwise.
What I’ve learned is that we all have access to a kind of knowing that goes beyond what we’ve been taught or told. The problem isn’t that we don’t have it. It’s that we’ve been conditioned to outsource it, to experts, to family, to culture, to anyone who seems more certain than we feel.
Learning to hear that voice, and trust it enough to act on it, is some of the most important work any of us can do.
The Long Way Home
By the time I was in my late thirties, I had a life that looked fine from the outside. But I felt invisible inside it, like I was living someone else’s version of what my life should be.
Then my body gave out, and in the strangest way, that was the beginning.
After emergency heart surgery and two major abdominal surgeries within six months, I found myself in an online forum for people recovering from the same procedures. It was the earliest days of the internet, and the fact that this community existed at all felt like a small miracle. I was looking for someone who understood what I was going through. What I found was Layne.
He was in Brisbane, Australia. I was in Chicago. Over the following year, emails became AOL chats, then phone calls, then something neither of us had planned on.
We married and lived in Chicago for seven years. By then two of my kids had already made their way to Brisbane for university. When my son was offered a full PhD scholarship at an Australian university, the only way for him to be eligible was to get his permanent residency. And the only way for him to get that was for Layne to sponsor him. So we moved across the world on maxed-out credit cards and a dream, and brought the youngest along with us.
The people who loved us were certain we were making a mistake. Something deeper knew otherwise.
Hard is not the same as wrong. The leap that looks reckless from the outside can feel like the most honest thing in the world from the inside. I didn’t plan this life. I chose it, one terrifying and clarifying decision at a time.
A Question of Permission
When I first started teaching, I thought my job was to show people how to move. Nearly thirty years later I now know it was always about something much more important.
The people who have stayed with me, the ones who come back year after year, or who write to me long after they’ve moved cities or changed lives, are not the ones who perfected their practice. They’re the ones who started asking different questions about what they actually believed, about whose expectations they had been living inside, about what they would do if they weren’t afraid of getting it wrong.
I’ve taught elite athletes and executives, people rebuilding after loss, people who came for the yoga and stayed for something they couldn’t quite name. Across all of those groups I saw people who were far more capable than they gave themselves credit for, and far more willing to defer to someone else’s authority than their own.
That’s what I went to work on.
I’m still working on it. The question at the heart of everything I do is a simple one: what becomes possible when you stop waiting for permission and start trusting what you already know?
I don’t have a tidy answer. But I’ve seen what happens when people get close to one, and it’s worth every question it takes to get there.
